Layered Beef Stew

My granddaughter, Taylor and I decided to do some stew today.  I usually do quarts as in a previous post, but got these great pint and half jars on sale at Lowes and thought we would do something pretty.  This is also a good way to make sure your ingredients are evenly distributed among your jars.

Ingrediets:  Yielded 14 jars (Pint and Half Size)

5 to 6 pounds of stew meat

6 to 7 pounds of potatoes

4 large onions

8 to 10 stalks of celery (I used One package)

2 pounds of carrots

2 quarts of tomatoe juice (Mixed with broth you
cooked the meat in)

Seasonings of choice

Fresh ground pepper

Canning Salt

First we cooked our meat for about 30 minutes.  While it was cooking we cut up all the other veggies.  This is what we started out with, but we ended up cutting up more to use up all the broth.   The total we cut up is what I listed as ingredients.

Taylor started with the meat and layered all these goodies in the jars.

Here's her pretty jars

I added the tomato juice to the beef broth that the meat cooked in along with the seasonings. Brought it to a gentle boil.

Add a tsp of salt to each jar.

Next we covered the stew with the hot broth leaving one inch headspace.  Removed all air bubbles.  Put on lids and rings and tighened down finger tight.

We placed the jars in the canner and put on the lid.

Vented the steam for 7 minutes (All American) or 10 minutes for the Presto

Put on the weight and processed for 90 minutes at 10 pounds pressure.

Let steam drop naturally.  Remove lid and wait 10 minutes.

Place jars on counter to cool for 24 hours

As you can see from the picture, most of the veggies floated to the

top.  This is the one thing I don't like about raw packing anything.  Hot packed foods don't float as bad, but it doesn't hurt the finished product.

Lable and Store